


Repair Work

by Dendritic_Trees



Series: Hurt/Comfort Garbage Pile [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Constructive Criticism Welcome, Fluff, Gen, Hugging, Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort Garbage Pile, Totally Gratuitous Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-26
Updated: 2015-10-26
Packaged: 2018-04-28 05:12:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5079181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dendritic_Trees/pseuds/Dendritic_Trees
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony just can't have broken tech in his tower.  And Bucky's arm is most definitely broken.  Now if everyone would just cool it with the <i>feelings</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Repair Work

**Author's Note:**

> Totally gratuitous hurt/comfort fluff entirely for its own sake.

“Sorry,” Steve said, “about this. Its just… I… sorry.” He repeated.

Tony sighed. He had had what could be charitably called mixed feelings about letting Steve squirrel his brain-washed ex-assassin not-actually-dead best friend away in his tower since before they arrived, but he thought he had done an okay job of keeping them to himself. Based the stream of alarmingly teary apologies Steve had given him all the way from his lab, he hadn’t.

“Not a problem Capsicle. Can’t have malfunctioning tech in my tower.  Its offensive, and bad for my reputation,” said Tony.

Steve cringed when he got the word malfunctioning, didn’t respond, and left Tony to stew in his own awkwardness until the elevator spat them out. 

“So, what did you say the problem was?” Tony asked again, standing in Steve’s living room. There was no sign of Barnes, or any indication of which room was his.

Steve sort of screwed up his face, and then said, “Bucky, his uhhhh –“ Steve broke off and waved vaguely in the direction of his own left shoulder. 

“Prosthetic?” Tony suggested. He did not also suggest that Steve should maybe consider developing some less stupid hang-ups, because he was about 70% sure that Steve was having some flavour of nervous breakdown and he didn’t want to exacerbate it and end up with two crazy supersoldiers.

“Yeah,” said Steve, “I don’t think its working right.”

“Yeah I kind of got that when you came and asked me to fix it. Not working right how?” Tony asked.

“I don’t know,” Steve told Tony’s shoes, “I think he’s in pain.”

“You think?” Asked Tony.  “Have you tried, I dunno, asking him if his arm hurts?”

Steve hunched over and made vaguely negating gestures with his hands, “he’s, not so much, I mean he hasn’t –“

“He’s still not talking?” said Tony.  He’d been aiming for sympathetic, but didn’t really think he’d managed to hit it.  So he shut up and set about extracting his foot from his esophagus.

Steve didn’t even look offended, “not a word.” He mumbled.

“Okay,” said Tony, “that’s fine, I can work with that.  I do, however, actually need to see the guy at some point.”

“Oh,” said Steve, like it had only just occurred to him that Barnes wasn’t in the room with them, “yeah, I’ll – I’m gonna go see if he’s up.”

It was two in the afternoon.

Steve slipped through the left-most door and Tony could hear some rustling and murmuring, and then Steve slipped out again, apparently determined to open the door as little as humanly possible, like Barnes was a cat that might get out.

“You can come in,” said Steve, “just don’t – don’t touch him okay, he really can’t – he needs space, right now.”

“Okay,” said Tony, “I realize that I am amazing.  And I do appreciate your acknowledgement of my magnificence, but I actually cannot fix, your buddy’s robot arm, without touching it.  Like, that is a thing that actually cannot be done.  So…”

Steve just nodded and nudged the door back open.

Tony was sure that when the Super-Duo had moved in, this bedroom had been organized like a normal person room, but all the furniture had been shoved back against the walls, leaving the entire centre of the room clear.  The bed had been positioned to directly face the door and was covered in a heap of blankets and pillows. 

Steve walked across the room and knelt down by the bed, “hey Bucky,” he said to the blanket pile, “this is Tony.”

The blankets shifted and reorganized themselves so Tony could see a pair of wide blue eyes, which were probably attached to the rest of Bucky Barnes, somewhere inside the blanket nest.

“Hey there,” Steve said again, “Can Tony see your arm?  He’s an engineer, he might be able to help.  To make it feel better.  C’mon now, please sit up.”

Bucky pulled himself stiffly out from under the covers.  Steve immediately reached out, as if to help, but stopped short.  Tony could see immediately, why Steve had come to get him. Bucky levered himself up with his right arm, and kept his left pressed against the side of his chest and his prosthetic fingers hooked around the collar of the hoodie he was wearing. Once he was upright, he shoved himself backwards until he hit the wall with a muffled grunt of pain. Then he sat their, cradling his left elbow with his right hand, and staring at them through a tangled mop of lank, dirty hair.  He looked better than he had when Steve had brought him to the tower, of course, when they’d shown up, he’d had a 103 degree fever and been bleeding all over Tony’s floor. Steve was practically sitting on his hands, like the instruction not to touch had been aimed at himself.

Tony stepped into the room and dumped his tool bag on the floor like he’d been invited in.  “Hey there Robo-cop,” he said.  “Heard your go-go gadget arm isn’t working so good.”

Steve cringed.  Tony ignored him.

“Y’know,” Tony continued, “I was just explaining this to Capiscle here, so he’s probably given you some kind of horrifyingly wrong impression of me, so I don’t blame you in the slightest, just to be totally clear, but I’m not actually a magician, so I kind of need to see your arm before I can fix it.”

Bucky had looked in his direction when he’d started talking.  And that was really all Tony could say as far as responsiveness went.

“Can you take your shirt off so I can see your arm?” Tony tried, “please?  Because that looks like it sucks, and quite frankly I think Cap’s brain might melt, and -”

Bucky unzipped his hoodie, shrugged it off is right shoulder, and then set about working it off his left. He grimaced whenever he had move his shoulder joint, and every time he did, Steve cringed.  He wasn’t wearing a shirt under the sweater, which was a little weird, but spared him having to repeat the process, which might have been the point.  Also he was lying under about six different blankets and looked kind of flushed, which also might have been relevant.

The casing on the prosthetic was still intact, and it wasn’t smoking, or throwing out sparks, so it was officially not as bad as it could have been.  Tony’s next immediate thought was to ask him to move it so he could see how the plating worked, but actually managed to repress the idea before it made it to his mouth.  Asking Barnes to do a bunch of things guaranteed to hurt was not likely to go over well and he wasn’t wearing enough armour to make that many super soldiers, that sad.

“Great,” he said instead, “good job. Now, how ‘bout you just tip right over so you’re metal side down.  Then you’ll feel probably better, and I can get a good look at what I’m doing.” He held is hands up and tipped them, to show Barnes what he wanted. 

“Aw, come on,” he said, when Barnes didn’t move.  The position he was trying to coax Barnes into put him backwards with respect to the headboard, so Tony grabbed a couple of pillows and dumped them at the end of the bed. “Lie down right here. You’re probably just getting some feedback into your shoulder, I’ll fix it right, up.”   

Bucky edged backwards into the corner and ignored Steve’s entreaties to come and lie down.

Tony settled in by the bed and flapped his hands at Steve.  “Shush, Spangles.”

He turned to Barnes and flashed him a huge, cheesy grin, because there was only so much sincerity he could take at a time and there was about to be a lot of it and wished desperately that Rogers would _go away_. He didn’t.  “You know, I get it.  Big explosion, and then you wake up and some maniac has bolted a bunch of goddamned metal into you.  Which sucks. And you want to head for the hills, but you can’t, on account of, your locked the hell up.  Which also clearly sucks.  And it hurts all the damn time.  So I’m thinking that the last thing you want, when you get un-locked up – wait, you do know that you are currently un-locked up.  Right?  Because, if you didn’t – uh – you’re not locked up.  You can leave anytime.  Although if you do that Capsicle here will probably cry, so we’d all kinda prefer that you didn’t. Anyway, when you get all nice and un-locked up the last thing you probably want, is some other jerk you don’t know poking and prodding you.  Because, I mean, enough’s enough. Why would you want to do that again? Am I close?” 

Barnes was actually looking at him.  He was blinking a lot, but there was definitely eye contact.  Which Tony focused on, because Steve was making emotional faces next to him, and Tony would rather not experience them.   

“Okay, you don’t know me, you don’t wanna come over here.  That’s fine, we can start with something else.  I’m flexible.”  Tony dove into his equipment bag and dug out a portable scanner.

Barnes didn’t like that. He grimaced and brought his hand (not the metal one) up to shield his face.  Tony had move really exceptionally fast to stop Steve grabbing the scanner out of his hand.  “Stop it Spangles,” he muttered while he fought not to overbalance, lost, and landed on his ass.

“Aw, don’t be like that,” he said to Barnes, who was still cowering, “look, its just a super fancy camera.” He turned it on, aimed it at his own elbow, and then flipping his tablet around so Barnes could see the resulting pictures of the bones and tendons in his arm.  “Pretty cool huh?  Little bit?  Maybe?”

Barnes peered out at the screen from between his fingers.  He even tracked the screen with his eyes when Tony moved it down is arm to his hand, so Barnes could see the bones of his hand, then wiggled his fingers.

“See,” he said, “its just a really fancy-ass camera.”  Which was honestly a total disservice to his scanner, but never let it be said he was incapable of simplification when it counted.  “Fancy-ass, x-ray camera.” He amended.  There was such a thing as too much simplification. “And it does supersoldiers too.” He added, waving it at Steve. 

Tony kept right on with is random and indiscriminate scanning until Barnes had his hand all the way back down in his lap and looked like he was back to just his baseline level of terror. Then he finally aimed it at Barnes, still with the screen flipped round, it was all being recorded by Jarvis anyway. “So, I can take a look, like so –“ he ran the scanner the length of Barnes metal arm, “and see inside your arm there. Except that it’s a total waste of time, when you’re all curled up like that, because everything is all bent and jumbled up, and I can’t see shit.  Which brings me back to my original point.  Please come lie down so I can fix your screwed up metal arm.”

Barnes edged forward. Then back.  The forward, and then back again.  Tony avoided looking at Rogers so he didn’t have to see the sort of faces he was undoubtedly making. By the time Barnes finished edging over to the edge of the bed and worked his way into a useful lying down position, Tony’s legs had gone to sleep and he’d given into the morbid urge to see what Rogers was doing.  Wincing every time Barnes moved and looking frankly more upset than Barnes did was what Rogers was doing.

“Super,” Tony said, just a touch too loud, once Barnes was settled.  “So now I’m going to take a look inside your arm that I can actually see.”

Tony ran the scanner down Barnes arm, starting at the top of his shoulder and running down his arm. “Okay,” he said, “well, the good news is that I can see the problem with your arm.  The bad news is its not so much _a_ problem as its like, nine.  At least nine problems.  Seriously, who designed this?  I mean, I’d ask if they were drunk, but I’ve definitely done better than this drunk. Was it a committee? Was it a drunk committee? Anyways, if you want all this sorted out you’d be better off just letting me make you a new arm. But the better news is that there’s a wire loose up in your shoulder – right – about –there,” he pointed, “and that’s going to be what’s shocking you, and given that its just hanging around in there its obviously already not connected to whatever it needs to connect to, so I can just yank it right out and you’ll feel much better and you won’t lose any functions – or at least not any function you haven’t lost already. So, uh, what do you say?”

Barnes didn’t say anything at all. He just stared at Tony and blinked a lot and then tilted his arm outward so Tony could get a clear view of where the plates joined together.  Tony was generally of the opinion that if you couldn’t communicate around someone not talking you were suffering from a tragic lack of imagination but Barnes was really pushing it.

“Come, on,” he said, “I really need a bit more than that before I go digging around inside your arm. Can you, I don’t know, nod, or, point, or something, really, whatever works?”

Barnes tilted his arm towards Tony a bit more emphatically and his eyes went all wide.

Tony had taken a trip to the land of loose-wires-where-you-don’t-want-them and it sucked there, and if he had even the faintest idea how that wiring worked (which let’s face it, he did) then Barnes had electricity running right through his shoulder and probably the whole upper left quarter of himself and it probably really, really _hurt_. So he really, really didn’t want to leave him that, but he also didn’t want to start yanking things out of Barnes arm when he wasn’t sure that Barnes was okay with that. 

The whole thing sucked.

“Okay,” he said to Barnes, “lets do this thing then, I’m just gonna pop this open, right here,” and he tapped hard on Barnes metal arm with two fingers.

Barnes cringed so violently that by the time Tony got his hands away and into the air, he was two feet away.

“Tony stop!” Steve yelped.

While Tony was fending Steve off, Barnes slid back over to the edge of the bed and held his arm out again.

“Ready to try again?” Tony said, artificially brightly, giving Steve one last shove to get him out of his face. If Barnes was willing to give it another shot when it obviously freaked him out that was a good enough yes for him. “Let’s, just, I dunno, go over this again.  I just need you to hold still and put up with me for, like, about seven seconds, and I’m gonna open up this panel here, there’s a loose wire under it, so I’ll pull that out, and then close you up again.” Tony tapped the plate in question again.

Barnes did not scream, punch him, attempt to throttle him, run away, or hide under his pile of blankets again. He did hold still. Tony decided they were as close to good to go as they were going to get. 

The plating on Barnes arm was designed to be able to open.  Tony could see the mechanism on his scans.  So he opened it.  There wasn’t a single loose wire under the plate, there were two, twisted together beyond the resolution of the scan, Tony yanked them both out, and snapped the plate shut again.

Barnes didn’t move, but he shuddered and his mouth opened, like he was about to say something, or maybe the muscles in his jaw were just unlocking.

Tony realized, belatedly, that his hand was still resting on Barnes upper arm.  When he pulled it back, Barnes shot his hand out and grabbed his sleeve. Tony spent a very long second being exceedingly aware that Barnes could break his wrist with very little effort, but he didn’t.   He tugged Tony’s hand back towards him and then very tentatively edged down to rest his cheek against Tony’s palm. 

Tony froze. He risked another glance at Steve, who was also frozen, with a look on his face not entirely unlike someone who was being stabbed in the stomach and was actually very pleased about it.

Tony wasn’t moving, Steve wasn’t moving, Bucky wasn’t moving but Tony could feel water dripping into his palm. “No, no don’t do that,” he said, and patted Bucky’s shoulder.  Bucky picked his head up a bit to look at him, and for a second Tony was sure he’d done the wrong thing.  And then Bucky abruptly tipped himself out of bed and directly onto Tony.  Tony made an ‘oomph’ noise.  However small he might be acting, Bucky was bigger than Tony, there was no conceivable situation in which he could fit into Tony’s lap. But he seemed determined to do it anyway.

It occurred to Tony, that there was a very good chance that Bucky had no idea who he was beyond the person who made his shoulder stop hurting, coupled with a lingering fear that Bucky might have him confused with his father.   Steve was still making that stabbed face of his, and while Bucky wept quietly onto his shoulder, Tony wondered if Bucky actually recognized Steve, or if he’d just got used enough to him to tolerate having him in the immediate vicinity.

They maintained that position for about thirty consecutive seconds before Tony couldn’t take it any more, “okay, this is great and all but how about you go and sob all over Steve now, because he is really much better at this than I am.”  He tugged Bucky’s shoulders a bit, trying to convince him to move.

Bucky seemed to object; he grabbed handfuls of Tony’s shirt, rather clumsily on the left, Tony noted absently and wouldn’t be moved.  Steve finally got his act together and reacted.  He reached out and stroked Bucky’s back and murmured, “Bucky, hey, Bucky, look at me, please look at me.”

Bucky actually did turn and look over his shoulder at Steve, there were still tears dripping down his face, but he let go of Tony’s shirt and didn’t resist as Steve tugged him backwards off of Tony and into his lap.  Then, abruptly, he turned and buried his face in Steve’s chest, clutching at his shirt instead, and yes, from this angle there was definitely something wrong with the fine motor control of his left hand.

They both seemed to be crying and it really was tremendously awkward, so Tony didn’t say anything else, grabbed his bag of tools, staggered upright, because he still couldn’t feel his legs, and backed out of the room.

 


End file.
